Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c11.11.3

c11.11.3

The story of Akbar’s struggle with his religious convictions is a long and involved one, in the course of which he became completely unorthodox, in the end resorting to a peculiar creed devised by himself called the *Dīn Ilāhī* or ‘Divine Faith’. Its doctrines enabled him to follow his own inclinations in most things, among which liberal views on the subject of art were included. Jahangir, nominally a *Sunni*, was too easygoing to allow any of the tenets of this belief which conflicted with his own pleasures or opinions to carry weight. In Shah Jahan we see a gradual reversion to the original principles of the orthodox faith, modified, however, by a craving for worldly pleasures, as shown by his magnificence and display. The lives of all these rulers, as manifested by their attitude towards every form of art, seem to prove that laws cannot restrain expression, and that temperament is more powerful than belief. No ordinance, however strongly worded or inspired, could prevent them from giving free play to their aesthetic impulses, as the painting and architecture of their time most eloquently testify. But that a literal interpretation of the Prophet’s precept could, and did, affect this artistic movement is observable in the reign of the last of the real ‘Great Moguls’, Aurangzeb. To his puritanical and ultra-orthodox disposition some decline in the arts may be traced, although it was by no means the only reason for their decay.